


before I was bent-backed I was dazzling

by surexit



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Old Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-06
Updated: 2012-02-06
Packaged: 2017-10-30 17:15:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/334137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surexit/pseuds/surexit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and Peggy and life and loss. Steve goes to visit Peggy in England in 2012.</p>
            </blockquote>





	before I was bent-backed I was dazzling

**Author's Note:**

> verbosewordsmith, genarti and unfinishedidea were all wonderful betas, thank you guys so much.
> 
> The title is from Rowlands' translation of this line of _Canu Llywarch Hen_ : 'kynn bum kein vaglawc bum eiryan'. _Canu Llywarch Hen_ is heartbreaking and beautiful and is about an old soldier and the horror of old age, and this is the first fic I've written where I knew what the title was going to be from the second line or so.

Steve steps off the plane into English air and draws a deep, shuddering breath. It’s taken a long time to get him here. Tony offered to fly him at first, with the careless generosity that he offers almost everything from milk right up to chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces and beyond, but Steve had said no. He didn’t want this to be easy, just a quick jump over the ocean with Iron Man, getting dropped off and picked up again like a kid. And he didn’t want Tony with him, not for this. For almost anything else, but not for this.

There’s a woman waiting for him in the arrivals hall, brown-haired and bright-eyed and bearing very little family resemblance to Peggy beyond a determined chin. Steve’s not sure if he’s pleased or disappointed by that. She’s holding a sign which says ‘Steve!’.

She spots him from a distance, unsurprisingly – Steve’s always painfully aware of his bulk in crowds like this – and waves, smiling brightly. Steve manages to smile back, and he hoists his duffle bag onto one shoulder before setting off towards her.

“Hello!” she says as Steve reaches her. The cadences of her voice are very similar to Peggy’s and it’s oddly shocking despite being expected. “Steve Rogers? I mean, obviously Steve Rogers, I read the newspapers.” She extends a hand.

“It’s very nice to meet you in person, Mrs Jute,” Steve says, shaking the hand.

“Oh God no, please call me Kath,” she says. “Mum wanted to come, but we thought it would be better not to expose you to all of the kids at once. Steve!” Steve jumps, but she’s gesturing at a tall teenage boy who’s been skulking some distance away. “Steve, come and take Mr Rogers’ bag.”

“I can manage,” Steve protests as the kid slouches over. The idea of having something carried for him is so clearly ridiculous, he almost wants to pull the bag away as this new Steve reaches for it. He manages to restrain the impulse. 

“Don’t be silly, Steve’s happy to. Steve, meet Steve.” There’s a very small smile on the woman’s face as the boy inspects Steve with a half-scowl. “He’s named after you,” she says to Steve, and he can feel his eyes widen.

“Not really,” says Steve the younger, swinging Steve’s bag onto one bony shoulder and gravely holding out a hand for Steve to shake. “I’m named after my great-uncle. _He_ was named after you.”

“Oh.” Steve looks at Kath.

“My uncle,” she says. “Mum’s big brother. Granny’s oldest son, most importantly, I suppose.”

“Oh,” Steve says again.

“Come on then, to the car,” Kath says briskly. “We’ll take you to see Granny tomorrow. It’s a bit too late for her now, and I expect you’re rather tired?”

Steve wants to say he’s absolutely fine and demand to be taken to the retirement home immediately, but Kath is right. Something in him wants to put off the moment for as long as possible, anyway.

***

Kath’s mother does look like Peggy, painfully so. An older Peggy, of course. The woman must be around sixty, both from her looks and from straightforward calculation on Steve’s part, with expressive lines starting to snake their way onto her face. If Steve concentrates hard he can see the influence of the man who fathered her in the slightly narrower angles of her cheeks. But if he doesn’t concentrate and sees her out of the corner of his eye, it’s difficult to restrain his flinch.

She’s called Frances, and she lives with the family – Kath and Kath’s husband and their three children – and she’s been quiet and reserved since Steve arrived, all the way through the greetings in the hall and the family dinner. 

Now Steve is helping her to wash up, handling crockery and cutlery as delicately as possible. He’s forgotten how to be around normal people – everything feels small and fragile and unhurried compared to the Avengers Mansion, and his shoulders are too wide for every door he walks through.

They’ve been working in silence for a while. Steve’s enhanced hearing can pick up where everyone else in the house is – small Steve has retreated to his bedroom to play video games, Kath is replying to emails, and the other two children, Tom and Jessica, sound like they’re trying to kill each other over a card game. He’s keeping one ear on the fracas, and it startles him when Frances finally speaks.

“She was almost married when she met you, you know.”

Steve turns to look at her, aware that he’s hunching his shoulders a little. “I know now,” he says. “It was in her file. I-“ It was one of the first things he asked for after he woke up, reading it into the early hours on his second night in the future. He didn’t realise he was hoping that she’d spent her whole life waiting for him until he knew she hadn’t.

“I don’t really blame you,” Frances says, stacking glasses neatly on the draining board. “I always knew that she probably never told you. And things happen in wartime – I don’t think even Dad blamed you. Mum was – is – Mum is a bit extraordinary, and Dad always... I don’t think he ever blamed anyone for loving her.” Her movements are precise and controlled, and she’s not looking at Steve, this little woman who should be younger than him, who should be his daughter. “But you’re going to have to give me some time.” She turns to look at Steve, meets his eyes with a clear gaze that is so exactly Peggy’s that Steve wants to run. “You have to understand, Mr Rogers, that I grew up with a brother named after the dead man my mother wished she’d married.”

Steve flinches before he can stop himself, the pleasure and guilt of hearing that crashing together uncomfortably in his head. He _really_ hopes only the guilt is showing, but he’s too raw and open for a moment or two to be sure. “I can’t apologise,” he says finally.

“No,” Frances says. “I don’t expect you to. I’m just glad, for once, that my father isn’t around anymore.”

“I _am_ sorry for your loss,” Steve says, relieved to grasp onto something he can be entirely sincere about.

Frances nods sharply. “Thank you, I appreciate it.”

Silence falls again.

Eventually, the washing-up is done, and Steve escapes to the spare room and the too-small spare bed, and opens his phone to call Tony. And then flips it shut again, because what can he say? To his... whatever? Tell him that the woman that Steve’s still in love with named her firstborn son after him? Yeah, no. Steve’s not the best at modern dating, but he’s pretty sure Tony’s not the one to talk to about this.

He’s not sure anyone is.

***

Peggy still wears her hair in the same lacquered style. The strands are thinner and fluffier and a gunmetal grey, but something about the sharp waves of it make the ravaged face beneath even more terrible. Just a year ago, Peggy was perfect and furious and focused, and now Steve is entering a small, institutional room with a bed and a TV and a chair. A chair containing a tiny, bent-backed woman with a lined and collapsing face, arthritic hands pulled into claws, and vague brown eyes. 

His heart hurts.

They reach Peggy’s side, and Frances gestures Steve onto a stool where he perches, uncomfortably aware of how golden and shining and healthy his government-issue body is in the grey old age of the retirement home. Everyone was looking at him as he passed by, all the old women and men, with something unconsciously greedy in their eyes.

Frances herself sits in the armchair next to Peggy's, and takes one of her hands gently, and says soothingly, “Hello, Mum. How are you today?”

Peggy’s eyes roll towards her and she says, “Did you let the cat out?”

“No, Mum, there’s no cat. How are you today?”

“Bored,” Peggy snaps, voice a little slurred.

“Not so good, then,” Frances says comfortably. “Hang on, Mum, let me just fix your blanket -” she’s twitching the blanket over Peggy’s legs into place, “- and I’ve brought someone to see you. Do you remember, Mum, Kathy told you last week? Steve is here, Steve Rogers. Captain America.”

There’s no response from Peggy, who has closed her eyes. Frances gestures at Steve to take her place in the armchair and Steve lurches to his feet. “Look, Mum,” Frances says, busily settling him in place, “look who’s here!” She places Peggy’s hand in his, and folds his fingers closed over the cold, papery skin. 

“I’m going to go and have a chat with her carer,” she says quietly to Steve, and she’s gone before Steve can voice the instinctive protest, the desire not to be left alone with the dying woman he loves.

He coughs in the suddenly bleak silence. There’s something burning at the back of his throat. “Hello, Peggy,” he tries. He can’t remember any of the things he wanted to say to her, can’t remember why he thought this was a good idea.

Peggy’s eyes blink slowly open. “Steve?” she says, on the edge of hearing, and her hand twitches in his. She’s not really looking at him though, eyes wandering.

“Hi, yes, hi, Peggy.” Steve knows his voice is choked.

“Steve, put some warm clothes on before you catch cold, honestly. You silly boy.”

She’s not talking to him. She’s talking to her son.

Steve scrubs his free hand across his eyes fiercely, and tries again.

“Peggy, it’s Steve Rogers. Remember that dance we never had? Peggy? Remember?”

“Steve, be careful or you’ll go through the ice!” There’s something of Peggy’s old force in the snapped command.

“I remember this,” a low voice intrudes from the doorway. Steve looks up as Frances comes into the room. “I think it was that cold winter in 1959. The pond near our house froze over, we went skating with Dad.” She puts a gentle hand on Steve’s shoulder and pats, something sad and weary in her eyes as she looks at him. “That was when she was still pretending she’d picked Steve’s name out of the newspaper on the day he was born. I never knew if Dad knew the truth before she told us.” Her hand falls away from Steve’s shoulder, and she bends into Peggy’s line of sight. “He didn’t go through the ice, though, did he, Mum?”

Peggy’s closed her eyes again, and Frances straightens with a sigh. “I just came to tell you that I’ll be in the sitting room when you’re done. You should probably have some privacy. Just...” She pats Steve’s shoulder again. “Just talk. She’d have liked to know what you were doing.”

She leaves again and Steve sits helpless, looking at his huge, sinewy hand engulfing Peggy’s tiny, blue-veined one. He wishes he hadn’t come. The rasp of Peggy’s breathing is the only sound in the room.

Finally, Steve clears his throat and says, “So I’m on a superhero team now. It’s – I think you’d like it. Them. It’s pretty goofy sometimes, in our downtime. But we’re really – we saved the earth last year, Peggy. The whole earth. And the people are great. Not – adjusting hasn’t always been easy. But.”

His throat’s a little raw. He clears it again. “I’m sorry I didn’t come before. It was pretty busy for a while, and then it took some time to find you – not long, Ton- there’s someone on the team who can get information really easily, and because you’re a war hero. But some time. And then.” The hand that isn’t holding Peggy’s is worrying itself into the hem of his sweater and he watches his fingers twisting into the fabric rather than looking at Peggy’s lined, hollow cheeks.

“They told me on the phone,” he says. “I called your granddaughter – Kath – and she said that they’d be delighted to meet me, but. But that you were – I should expect you – this.” He looks back up at Peggy’s face, and knows his own is finally starting to twist with grief for everything he’s lost. “I knew, Peggy. I knew way before I made the call, I _knew_ you were ninety-eight and I just. I hoped. That we could talk, that I could tell you...” He has to let go of her hand, to twine both of his hands together and focus on the slide of skin. “I just wanted to say I love you.”

The words drop heavily into the silence, and Steve stares at his fingers until his eyes start to burn.

There’s a change in the rasp of Peggy’s breathing, and Steve’s eyes dart nervously to her face. Her eyes are open, and she’s looking at him for the first time since he arrived. There’s a moment where nothing happens, where they just look at each other, and then, “Thank you,” she says, croaked and cracked.

“You’re welcome,” Steve says, because he can’t think of anything else to say. He’s not entirely sure that she’s seeing him, doesn’t know if that thank you is for him or part of some long-past scene playing through her brain. She closes her eyes with a sigh, and that, apparently, is the best he’s going to get.

He thinks about leaving. That was what he wanted to say, what he wanted to make sure she knew before they were separated again by death. But he looks around the neat room, the muted TV playing something featuring people with bright white teeth, the dusty books on the bookshelf, and he pulls his chair a little closer, takes Peggy’s hand again and starts to talk. Tells her about everything he can, everything he’s seen in the future and everything he misses about the past, about being a hero and being a lost man at the same time. He tells her about each of the Avengers, one by one, and finally he tells her about Tony, about the ways he’s like Howard and the ways he’s like Bucky and the ways he’s not like either of them.

Sometimes, while he’s talking, Peggy smiles and nods, and maybe some of those smiles are for him, and maybe they’re for someone long gone, long dead. Maybe both things are true.

It’s okay.

***

He finds Frances, as promised, in the home’s sitting room when he’s finished, eating cookies and drinking tea and watching the same television programme, the cheery talk show, that was playing in Peggy’s room. Steve changed the channel before he left, flipped until he found a nature programme full of breathtaking shots of far-away places. He doesn’t know if it was presumptuous of him – maybe the person Peggy became without him loved the kind of daytime television that involved people swapping banal observations – but he hopes she enjoys the change, at least. 

Frances directs a small smile at him when he comes in, her face more open than it was before, and gets up to come and meet him near the door. “Ready to go?” she says, and steps outside the sitting room without waiting for an answer. Steve follows her into the green corridor.

“Don’t you need to talk to her?”

Frances shrugs. “I come every other day. I don’t know if she -” She breaks off, and shakes her head. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Steve says, not sure what she’s apologising for.

Frances looks away, and says, “Dad died quickly. Heart attack. But Mum, bloody-minded Mum, she just keeps hanging on and on and on.” She pats her hair in its neat bun, and says, “Sorry,” again.

“No, I –“ Steve isn’t sure what to say, and Frances glances at him with a tight smile.

“I’d like to skip this one visit, Mr Rogers. I’d like to not go and talk to the shell of my mother for the third time this week, and try desperately to pretend that the fact of her continued existence is a joy rather than a painful burden. I’d like to go home.”

Steve nods, because what else can he do? “I,” he stops, but Frances is looking at him invitingly, as though eager for some response to her words. So he stumbles on. “I – I’m glad she’s hanging on. But I hope...” He trails off, because he can’t hope that Peggy dies, and he can’t hope that she lives.

“Yes,” Frances says. “Exactly. Well, come on, Mr Rogers. It’ll be teatime by the time we get home.”


End file.
